The government actions of populist radical right (PRR) parties have predominantly been scrutinized at the national level, leaving a critical aspect – their territorial foothold – largely unexplored. Through a comparative ethnographic study of two medium-sized French towns governed by the Rassemblement National since 2014, this article delves into how seizing municipal power has influenced the party's efforts towards mainstreaming. We examine the party's strategy, aimed at institutionalization, which relies on a blend of rhetoric emphasizing proximity, pragmatism, and non-partisan administration while preserving fundamental ideological elements of the radical right. This amalgamation of mainstreaming and radicalism, adaptive to different contexts and audiences, is termed ‘adaptable ideology’. Our study makes significant contributions to two pivotal aspects of the literature: understanding the mainstreaming trajectory of PRR parties and exploring the recent, localist turn in the study of this political realm.

The rise of populism in Western Europe is often portrayed as a reaction to globalisation and supra-national integration processes. However, the domestic-international divide is only one aspect of the scalar organisation of government. In this article, we explore the relationship between populist attitudes and orientations towards state scales more generally. Drawing on a representative survey of 4033 citizens in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland, we show that populist attitudes are linked to preferences for those state territories viewed as ‘closer to the people’ not only in a metaphorical but also in a scalar sense. The results suggest that the rise of populism should not only be considered a response to a crisis of party government in a context of globalisation but also as a response to a crisis of national statehood.

The way that leaders and citizens cope with stress is under-theorised in the study of International Relations (IR). This article anchors psychological studies on coping to the literature theorising emotions in IR to clarify two unaddressed questions: (1) how do political actors – individuals and collectives – cope with both sudden crises and long-term change?; and (2) in the context of international politics, whose coping matters, and under what conditions? Our coping framework demonstrates that intersubjective appraisal of urgency from everyday stressors triggers a process that elevates individual coping to the collective level. Circulation of coping responses, a key but neglected process of scaling up, binds individuals to affective communities. Our theoretical contribution is an innovative coping framework to explore how individual pursuit of well-being is transformed into collective agency. The methodological novelty is the triangulation of emotional representation with survey data and in-depth interviews to capture the circulation of coping responses. We illustrate our conceptual framework with the overlooked case of Hong Kong. Our findings suggest coping constitutes conditions of political possibilities, in that individual Hong Kongers’ efforts to sustain emotional well-being are aggregated to create momentum for a state-building project unexpected by the former British colonisers or the Chinese Communist Party.

The notion of ‘place’ has become a central concern in research on the populist radical right (PRR), but scholars seem to have different things in mind when talking about how geography affects individual political attitudes. In our paper, we therefore aim to structure the debate on the impact of place and to understand exactly how place affects PRR attitudes (nativism, right-wing authoritarianism, and populism). Conceptually, we identify four potentially relevant aspects of ‘place’ that underpin much of the current literature: place-related attitudes (localism and resentment), place-specific living conditions, socio-demographic composition, and characteristics unique to a particular place, i.e., its local history and culture. We also discuss how these aspects are related and how they may interact. Empirically, we assess the relative importance of these four aspects of place for PRR sentiment in Germany, a country that is particularly well suited to this type of analysis. Using fine-grained geocoded survey data collected prior to the 2017 election, we find that (1) there is considerable spatial variation and clustering in PRR attitudes, (2) a place’s socio-demographic composition and (3) place resentment account for much of this, while (4) localism has weaker effects. We find (5) no relevant interaction between localism and place resentment, (6) no substantial evidence that mediation through place-related attitudes leads to an underestimation of the other aspects, and (7) no evidence for effects of the unique culture or history of the places we studied. Moreover, (8) location in the former GDR still has a substantial impact, whereas (9) other place-specific conditions (deprivation, demographic decline, migration, rurality) that could be addressed by policy interventions have no or rather weak effects. We conclude that PRR sentiment in ‘places that don’t matter’ results also, though by no means exclusively, from a lack of recognition.

Theorists with strongly communal understandings of the common good frequently criticize the modern liberal state for failing to provide for the common good and for interfering with local communities. These critics, however, are less clear about what role, if any, the state should play in modern life. In order to trace a middle ground between liberal attempts to justify the state and too hasty communitarian condemnations of it, I develop a two-tiered theory of political justification. All political justification is to be seen in relationship to the common good of a community. While only local communities have a common good and a direct claim to political authority, the state can still have an indirect and derivative authority. After examining how this theory applies to thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, I propose an appropriate model for the relationship between local communities and the state.

We analyze the results of a neighbor-to-neighbor, grassroots get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drive in Virginia, in which unpaid volunteers were encouraged to contact at least three nearby registered voters who were likely co-partisans yet relatively unlikely to vote in the 2017 state election. To measure the campaign’s effectiveness, we used a pairwise randomization design whereby each volunteer was assigned to one randomly selected member of the most geographically proximate pair of voters. Because some volunteers unexpectedly signed up to participate outside their home districts, we analyze the volunteers who adhered to the original hyper-local program design separately from those who did not. We find that the volunteers in the original program design drove a statistically significant 2.3% increase in turnout, which was concentrated in the first voter pair assigned to each volunteer. We discuss implications for the study and design of future GOTV efforts.

To our knowledge no previous studies have been conducted at the local authority level assessing relationships between alcohol-related hospital admission, specialist alcohol treatment provision and socioeconomic deprivation since the UK government passed the Health and Social Care Act in 2012. Our results, using publicly available national data-sets, suggest that the local authority areas in England most in need of adequately funded specialist alcohol treatment, because of high prevalence of alcohol dependence and deprivation, are not receiving targeted increased funding, and that the national rise in alcohol-related hospital admissions may be fuelled by local authority funding cuts to specialist alcohol treatment.

In order to advance both the mapping and theorizing of transnational law, this article considers a range of tactics used by small-scale fisheries (SSFs) in Europe and North America to improve market access, political influence, and legal recognition. Transnational law enables the framing of initiatives not only as implementation practices that occur as a result of international law, but also as transnational regulation in support of SSFs. The article uses the case study of SSFs to draw attention to the rise of ‘transnational localism’. This is defined as the reinforcement of local-specific approaches (reflecting local ecologies, values, and socio-economic specificities) within a transnational structure that provides support and recognition. It offers an alternative to the view that globalization necessitates global, uniform regulatory solutions. Transnational localism challenges the fascination with large certification schemes such as that administered by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) in fisheries governance. It implies a need to reconcile transnational challenges with heterogeneous values and community approaches. To capture the simultaneous demand for the local and transnational within transnational law, this article proposes treating the described empowerment tactics within the scope of transnational standards. This requires a rethinking of standards away from fixed technical rules that are uniformly applicable across the globe.

Recent governments have introduced a plethora of reforms seeking to decentralise power to local government in England. Invariably, however, these have fallen short of stated objectives, leaving councils at the mercy of central supervision and with insufficient local autonomy. This paper explores the reasons underpinning this concern. It identifies a top-down approach to localism and considers the culture of centralism that persists as a consequence. It then discusses how a bottom-up approach might be achieved, exploring how political and legal mechanisms can protect councils from centralised interference in the future.

Community participation has become an essential element of government policy around the globe in recent decades. This move towards ‘government through community’ has been presented as an opportunity for citizens to gain power and as a necessary part of the shift from government to governance, enabling states and communities to tackle complex problems in tandem. However, it has also been critiqued as an attempt to shift responsibility from the state onto communities. Using evidence from detailed case studies, this article examines the implementation of Localism in England and Community Empowerment in Scotland. The findings suggest a need for a more nuanced analysis of community participation policy, incorporating risk alongside responsibility and power, as well as considering the agency of communities and the local state. Furthermore, understanding the constraints on community participation is key, particularly in terms of the enveloping impacts of austerity and state retrenchment.

While it was traditionally accepted that Hongkongers shared a form of pan-Chinese cultural identification that did not contradict their local distinctiveness, over the last decade Hong Kong has seen the rise of new types of local identity discourses. Most recently, “localists” have been a vocal presence. Hong Kong has – quite unexpectedly – developed a strong claim for self-determination. But how new is “localism” with respect to the more traditional “Hong Kong identity” that appeared in the 1970s? The present study takes a two-dimensional approach to study these discourses, examining not only their framework of identification (local versus pan-Chinese) but also their mode of identification (ethno-cultural versus civic). Using three case studies, the June Fourth vigil, the 2012 anti-National Education protest and the 2014 Umbrella movement, it distinguishes between groups advocating civic identification with the local community (Scholarism, HKFS) and others highlighting ethnic identification (Chin Wan). It argues that while local and national identification were traditionally not incompatible, the civic-based identification with a local democratic community, as advocated by most participants in recent movements, is becoming increasingly incompatible with the ethnic and cultural definition of the Chinese nation that is now being promoted by the Beijing government.